Mmmm… delicious…

I’ve been spending a lot of time with del.icio.us lately, and am struck by the “me-ness” of the service, as explained by peterme:

While del.icio.us thrives as a “social bookmark” site, it depends on the me-ness of the activity — by and large, I’m saving items to del.icio.us that interest me, that I might want to return to later, and the posting-for-others aspect is largely secondary. It’s an added benefit, but not the raison d’etre.

One of the key emerging trends we’re seeing with things like del.icio.us and Flickr is the merging of personal information architecture and public/shared/group/emergent information architecture. And one of the things we’re seeing in the *use* of these systems is self-centeredness — how else do you explain the prevalence of “me” on Flickr?

To get back to the notion of annotating space — I would argue that people will annotate space much like they annotate the web, or annotate their photos… More in a notebook sense, a journaling sense. The annotations are explicitly *not* “meant for other people” — they’re meant for yourself, they only have to make sense for yourself, and if others stumble across them, great, fine.

Jon Udell called it: real-time bookmarking and tagging and tight feedback loops lead to better collective filtering and sharing of information in an increasingly interconnected world.

My delicious page is now something I think about whenever I visit a page and think to myself that I might want to visit that page again. It’s like explicity pointing out parts of my personal web that I would highly recommend to others.